when will ruby 1.8.6 be retired?

Question

I can't seem to find any info on this... when will ruby 1.8.6 be 'retired'? ruby 1.8.7 is much more functional while maintaining syntax compatibility, and ruby 1.9.1 is significantly better all around... any idea when 1.8.6 will be retired?

Answer 1

I don't think any versions of Ruby are ever formally retired. Things like Rails will eventually become incompatible, but older versions are always available.

People will continue using older versions of Ruby for a while. Forcing an upgrade is never easy.

Answer 2

I suspect the main laggards with respect to ruby will be packaging systems for Linux.

When I was using Fedora Linux, I remember that ruby 1.9 was available for download from ruby-lang.org, but wasn't available as an RPM package (apart from source RPM).

Does anyone know about the status of ruby with the major Linux distributions?

Answer 3

@andrewgrimm AFAIK Debian stable has 1.8.7 and 1.9.0, Debian testing has 1.8.7 and 1.9.1. Don't know about the others.

Answer 4

Since RubyGems no longer officially supports 1.8.6 i think it's safe to say 1.8.6 is retired as of 'now'

see: http://blog.segment7.net/articles/2010/04/23/ruby-1-8-6-policy

Answer 5

Hopefully not before I finish the Ruby book I'm reading (it's written to 1.8.6). I'd better finish that soon and then get up to date.